Middlebury College

Weekly Web Development Round-up July 11-July 15, 2011

To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

We use these posts to let you know about what we’ve already changed, but we understand that many of the people using our services would also like to know about changes before they happen. You can now subscribe to a mailing list where we discuss changes to systems, upgrades, and occasionally new features. The list is moderated by Joe who approves new subscriptions to ensure that only Middlebury personnel are receiving this information.

Drupal

Chrome users can now search the website using their voice. Click on the microphone icon in the search box and start speaking. The browser will try to figure out what you’re saying and search for it. As other browsers implement this feature it should automatically work in them as well.

I’m interested in your statement about “aggregat[ing] content from the CONTENTdm Digital Collections at Middlebury into the website.” I work with/add to these collections, but I’m not sure what you mean by that — (it sounds good though) . . . Can you explain a little more?

Certainly. We’d like to promote some of the collections in CONTENTdm on the website. For instance, a part of our site like Amherst’s Video and Audio of Reunion Events but with our Digital Lecture Archive as the source of content. We could segment this content so that a list of lectures in the archive appear on each of our academic department sites, for instance.

The Feeds OAI-PMH Fetcher and Parser module we’ve installed allows Drupal to connect to CONTENTdm, fetch metadata, and store all of the Dublin Core fields as content in Drupal. When a record is updated in CONTENTdm, the Drupal module updates its records automatically. It doesn’t go the other way, so you don’t need to worry that we’re going to mess up any records in CONTENTdm.

When Bryan returns from his vacation, he’s going to work with me to get this configured in development and we’ll begin building some of these features. Getting more exposure to the DLA is just the use case that prompted us to test this out. I’m sure there are more things we can do by connecting these two systems. For instance, I just noticed that images in the archives include their location, so we could show all of the photos from Le Chateau on the Campus Map when someone looks up that location. If you have other suggestions, we’d love to hear them!